Florida Family Lawyer Blog
Mediation is available for you at different stages of the process of your pursuing your Florida divorce or other family law case. For a Broward County Divorce and for most other family law cases in Broward, Dade or Palm Beach county, you will be required to attend mediation before you can go to trial and finish your case, if you have not been able to settle the case on your own with the other side. You can also use mediation as a way to try to resolve you divorce, before filing suit in court – i.e. you and the other party to the case go to mediation and try to settle rather than litigating the case in court. Whatever route to mediation you take, there are some things you can do before the mediation to prepare – to help the mediation be as successful as possible and to help be sure the time in mediation is well spent, and used efficiently.
One approach would actually be to not prepare at all – go to the mediation without necessarily having thought a lot about the issues you want to settle, and without having checked on the value of assets, balances in different accounts, etc.; and use the mediator and the first one or two hour mediation session as a way to organize the issues and the financial information you will need to put together. Many times though you can get a lot of work done during one mediation session, and doing some preparation before the session can help make that possible.
You can get together a list of all of the assets and debts, and the “fair market value” of each asset and balance owing for each debt. Fair market value is basically what you can sell the item for now, whether it’s furniture, jewelry, or a used car. You’ll want to include on your list all of the assets acquired and debts incurred during the marriage, because the determining factor under Florida law in deciding whether an asset/debt is “marital”, is not whose name an asset or debt is in, but when it was acquired. It’s helpful to bring the most recent statement available with you to the session, for each bank account, credit card, retirement account, etc. You can obtain a credit report for yourself and the other spouse/parent or have an asset search done regarding the other party. Bring your most recent pay stub, and pay stubs for the past few months, if you are employed, or other documentation of your income if you are not an employee. Child support and alimony will be based on your net income, computed under the rules described in the Florida family law statutes. Having the pay stubs will help allow each parent/spouse confirm the other’s income. Also, often the parties, when they do the calculations themselves, compute their net income incorrectly, or at least in a way that is not consistent with the Florida family law rules/law. Your mediator can help both sides arrive at the income amounts to use.
Sometimes there will be a dispute regarding one or both sides earning potential, and the income determination may end up being more complicated. In a Florida divorce or other family law case, a Judge can “impute” income to a party, if the party is under-employed or voluntarily unemployed. (continued in Part II)
